FBI Translating 1000 Wiretaps Daily

The
FBI is now churning out translations of 34,000 wiretapped conversations a month - a startling number given how few, full-on FBI agents speak Arabic -cough- 33 -cough -. Noah over at Danger Room got to the story from Bad Guys blogger David Kaplan before 27B had time:

One thing the Bureau did not do [...] is use some sort of translation software. Kaplan "specifically asked if they were using machine translation in this, and they said no." Instead, flesh-and-blood linguists parsed every one of those "5,508,217 electronic data files" and "1,847,497 pages of text" over the past four years.

Now, the FBI is famously tech-phobic. So this shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. But interpretive software like this has gotten pretty good at "gisting" -- making rough, first-cut translations. It makes the human translators you have more efficient. Which is helpful, when you've got millions of documents to pore over.

Danger Room link. Original story. Photo: Joshua Wickerham